IHS Markit: Enterprise Data Center SDN savings yet to be realized
by Josh Bancroft, IHS Markit Analyst
IHS Markit recently surveyed 100 North American enterprises that are evaluating or implementing software-defined networking (SDN) for the data center by 2020. Respondents currently evaluating SDN expect that it will drive operational- and capital-expenditure decreases at a faster pace than what has been experienced by those already deploying SDN.
“Migrating to SDN means deploying new equipment, upgrading existing equipment, and training IT staff, which requires investment,” said Josh Bancroft, senior analyst, cloud and data center research, IHS Markit. “Those evaluating SDN need to adjust their expectations that savings might not be felt immediately, but instead might happen over a longer period of time.”
The 2018 “Data Center SDN Strategies North American Enterprise Survey” indicated that the transition to live SDN deployment is well underway. By the end of 2019, 74 percent of respondents will be in production trials, and 36 percent will be in live production, up from 38 percent and 20 percent, respectively, in 2018. Enhancements have been made by vendors, including integrating network analytics to improve application performance and security. Doing so will encourage enterprises to deploy SDN, since improved application performance and improved security were two of the top drivers for deploying SDN. Other top deployment drivers for SDN included; decreased operating costs, simplified network provisioning and improved management capability.
In the IHS Markit survey, Cisco, VMware, and Dell EMC were identified as the SDN hardware and software manufacturers with which respondents were most familiar.
Following are some additional highlights from the survey:
- Top deployment barriers among the respondents were the interruption of critical network operations (30 percent), interoperability with existing network equipment (29 percent) and lack of trained staff (29 percent)
- Less than half (48 percent) of respondents expect capital expenditures (capex) to increase again in the second year of deployment. However, capex increased in the second year for 61 percent of those who have deployed SDN, which suggests those evaluating deployment should adjust their expectations.
- Nearly one-third (31 percent) of respondents chose automated disaster recovery as the top use case for capex reduction, while 35 percent selected automated provisioning as the top use case for operating expenditure (opex) reduction, and 30 percent chose automation for application deployment as the top use case for employee productivity.
- By 2020, 83 percent of respondents will be in live production with data center SDN.
Data Center SDN Strategies North American Enterprise Survey
This IHS Markit survey analyzes the trends and assesses the needs of enterprises deploying SDN in their data centers. The study probes issues defining how the enterprise market will evolve with data center SDN, including deployment drivers and barriers, rollout plans, applications, use cases, vendors installed and under evaluation, top rated vendors, and more.
IHS Markit: Huawei Led Global 4G LTE Infrastructure Market which totalled $22.9B in 2018; China CAPEX bottoms out
By Stéphane Téral, director, IHS Markit
Key information from China released over the past two weeks indicate that China’s 4G LTE capital expenditures (capex) totaled $17.3 billion in 2018, which is 8.5 percent above the initial plan. Among the three Chinese service providers – China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom – China Mobile was responsible for much of the increase in plan, spending $1.5 billion more than its initial plan released in March 2018.
With this hike in China’s capex, along with solid sustained infrastructure spending in Europe, Middle East, Africa and various countries in Asia, global 4G LTE infrastructure revenue was $22.9 billion in 2018.
Huawei finished 2018 with 31 percent market share in the global mobile infrastructure market, which includes 2G, 3G and 4G hardware macrocell networks. Huawei was followed by Ericsson with 27 percent and Nokia with 22 percent.
As always, March is an important month in China, as it is punctuated by full-year financial results and the release of guidance for the full calendar year from China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. Given the magnitude of telecom capex in China, everyone involved in the telecom ecosystem pays attention to what the three service providers say, particularly their plans for the year.
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On April 1, 2019 Mr Teral wrote: Capex in China has bottomed out; 5G produces a 3% YoY increase!
O-RAN Alliance and Linux Foundation form O-RAN Open Source Community; Open Networking Assessment and Telcos
On April 2nd, the O-RAN Alliance and the Linux Foundation jointly announced the creation of the O-RAN Software Community (O-RAN SC). The O-RAN SC will provide open software aligned with the O-RAN Alliance’s open architecture. As a new open source community under the Linux Foundation, the O-RAN SC is sponsored by the O-RAN Alliance, and together they will develop open source software enabling modular, open, intelligent, efficient, and agile disaggregated radio access networks. The initial set of software projects may include: near-real-time RAN intelligent controller (nRT RIC), non-real-time RAN intelligent controller (NRT RIC), cloudification and virtualization platforms, open central unit (O-CU), open distributed unit (O-DU), and a test and integration effort to provide a working reference implementation. Working with other adjacent open source networking communities, the O-RAN SC will enable collaborative development across the full operator network stack.
Background: The telecom industry is experiencing a profound transformation and 5G is expected to radically change how we live, work, and play. This means it’s critical to make network infrastructure commercially available as quickly as possible to ensure business success for operators. It’s time to turn to open source, as it is one of the most efficient ways to accelerate product development in a collaborative and cost-efficient way.
“This collaboration between the O-RAN Alliance and the Linux Foundation is a tremendous accomplishment that represents the culmination of years of thoughtful innovation around the next generation of networks,” said Andre Fuetsch, Chairman of the O-RAN Alliance, and President of AT&T Labs and Chief Technology Officer at AT&T. “The launch of the O-RAN SC marks the next phase of that innovation, where the benefits of disaggregated and software-centric platforms will move out to the edge of the network. This new open source community will be critical if 5G is to reach its full potential.”
“We are really excited to see the establishment of the O-RAN Open Source Community,” said Chih-Lin I, chief scientist of China Mobile, co-chair of the O-RAN Technical Steering Committee and member of the Executive Committee of the O-RAN Alliance. “The O-RAN Alliance is aiming at building an ‘Open’ and ‘Smart’ Radio Access Network for future wireless systems. From day one, the Alliance has embraced open source as one of the most powerful means to achieve its vision. The O-RAN Open Source Community is the fruit of a yearlong extensive deliberation between the O-RAN Alliance and the Linux Foundation. We believe that the power of open source will further the momentum and accelerate the development, test, commercialization and deployment of O-RAN solutions.”
“We are excited to collaborate with O-RAN Alliance in bringing communities together to create software for this important access area of Telecommunications,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IOT, the Linux Foundation. “This step towards execution marks another major milestone in networking partnerships across standards and open source organizations.”
About O-RAN Alliance
The O-RAN Alliance is a world-wide, carrier-led effort to drive new levels of openness in the radio access network of next generation wireless systems. Future RANs will be built on a foundation of virtualized network elements, white-box hardware and standardized interfaces that fully embrace O-RAN’s core principles of intelligence and openness. An ecosystem of innovative new products is already emerging that will form the underpinnings of the multi-vendor, interoperable, autonomous RAN, envisioned by many in the past, but only now enabled by the global industry-wide vision, commitment and leadership of O-RAN Alliance members and contributors.
More information about O-RAN can be found at www.o-ran.org.
About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information please visit us at www.linuxfoundation.org.
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Assessment of Open Networking:
While Open Source Software (e.g. ONAP from ONF, Sonic from OCP) and Hardware (from OCP, TIP, Open RAN consortiums, ONF, etc) for networking is advancing rapidly, Open Networking via SDN, NFV, SD-WAN is really a euphemism for closed networking. That’s because almost all such “Open Networks” are proprietary to either the service provider (e.g. Amazon, Google, AT&T, etc) or SD-WAN vendor (many).
Some hyper-scale cloud providers (e.g. Microsoft) use a mix of open source software and purpose built proprietary software. Others (like Amazon and Google) use only their own (proprietary) software. Open Networking hasn’t much of an impact on the enterprise network yet, because of complex support and training issues. It seems like the main beneficiary of open networking will be Facebook (which started the OCP and TIP) and global telcos/ISPs (e.g. Yahoo Japan).
Telco Focused Open Source Projects:
Telcos such as AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile, DTK, and others have embraced open source technologies to move faster into the future. And LF Networking is at the heart of this transformation. AT&T seems to be the leading open source software telco. The company contributed their own software on virtual networks as ONAP to the Linux Foundation. The project is now being used by in production by other companies, and AT&T in return is benefiting from the work the competitors are doing to improve the code base.
AT&T also led the effort on Project CORD (Central Office Rearchitected as a Data center). CORD combines NFV, SDN, and the elasticity of commodity clouds to bring data center economics and cloud agility to the Telco Central Office. CORD lets the network operator manage their Central Offices using declarative modeling languages for agile, real-time configuration of new customer services. Major service providers like AT&T, SK Telecom, Verizon, China Unicom and NTT Communications are already supporting CORD.
AT&T contributed to the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) work on multi-gigabit PON virtual optical line termination hardware abstraction (VOLTHA), which is an open source software stack for PON networks. ONF is now working on integrating the ONAP operating system with multi-gigabit passive optical networks. ONAP was created by the merger of the Open ECOMP platform created by AT&T Labs with a similar, preexisting open source development project.
AT&T and the ONF will build on ongoing field trials of XGS-PON technology designed to support speeds up to 10 Gbps. The current XGS-PON trial is testing multi-gigabit high-speed internet traffic and providing AT&T DirecTV NOW video to trial participants. “Collaboration and openness across AT&T, the ONF and VOLTHA teams will be key to bringing this 10 Gbps broadband network to customers faster,” said Igal Elbaz, AT&T senior vice president of wireless network architecture and design, in the press release. “Now that we’ve proven the viability of open access technology in our trials, we can start the integration with our operations and management automation platform – ONAP.
ONF also provides a variety of Reference Designs, which are are “blueprints” developed by ONF’s Operator members to address specific use cases for the emerging edge cloud. Each Reference Design is backed by specific network operator partner(s) who plan to deploy these designs into their production networks and will include participation from invited supply chain partners sharing the vision and demonstrating active investment in building open source solutions.
The Telecom Infra Project aims to collaborate on building new technologies, examining new business approaches, and spurring investment in the telecom space. TIP Project Groups are divided into three strategic networks areas that collectively make up an end-to-end network: Access, Backhaul, and Core and Management. TIP members include operators, suppliers, developers, systems integrators, startups, and other entities that have joined TIP to build new technologies and develop innovative approaches for deploying telecom network infrastructure. Most telco members are outside the U.S. However, Century Link, Cox Communications, Sprint, and Windstream are U.S. based members. Representatives from Deutsche Telekom, BT, Vodafone, and Telefonica are on the TIP Board of Directors.
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References:
https://techblog.comsoc.org/category/open-source-telecom-software/
AT&T, ONF Collaborate on Virtualized Multi-Gigabit PON Service Automation
Dialog Axiata launches mobile 5G pilot network in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka’s largest mobile network operator by subscribers, Dialog Axiata has launched what it says is South Asia’s first “fully standards based 5G” pilot service in collaboration with Huawei. Of course, that’s impossible because the IMT 2020 5G recommendations for ITU-R and ITU-T won’t be completed till the end of 2020 or later.
The successful demonstration used Huawei-based RAN and core network with the most current 5G non-standalone architecture (from 3GPP Release 15) to transmit data to a 5G smartphone. The mobile network operator claims it is South Asia’s first pilot mobile 5G service.
Dialog Axiata group chief executive Supun Weerasinghe said the trial marks another step towards the operator’s introduction of 5G in the region. The operator has to date upgraded over 20% of its base stations to support Massive MIMO technology, giving them 5G ready status.
“The success of South Asia’s first demonstration of a mobile 5G service is yet another milestone following our launch of a fully functional pre-commercial 5G network and builds on our significant investments into high speed broadband network infrastructure in Sri Lanka, Dialog will continue to deliver on its promise of delivering The Future.Today. by leveraging the unique capabilities of 5G technology, to spearhead the country’s transformation into a regional technology hub,” he said.
Dialog Axiata launched its pre-commercial 5G network at the end of last year, demonstrating South Asia’s first fully functional and “standards compliant 5G” transmission using commercial grade base stations. Unveiled at the end of December 2018, the cellco’s pre-commercial trial was fulfilled via a partnership with the industry watchdog the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL), which is making available 3.5GHz band spectrum to pilot 5G. In the trials, Dialog reportedly achieved data speeds of more than 2 Gbps in a live setting.
To date Dialog has since then upgraded over 20% of its expansive base station network to a “5G Ready Status” by deploying Massive MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technology. The same infrastructure will transmit 5G speeds upon the licensing of commercial 5G spectrum in Sri Lanka, enabling the delivery of nationwide 5G coverage.
References:
https://www.telecomasia.net/content/dialog-axiata-announces-5g-pilot-service
IBD: 5G Network Rollout Spending, Silicon, Entrepreneurship, Use Cases and Applications
Spending On 5G Network Rollout
Morgan Stanley estimates that about $225 billion will be spent on 5G network deployment from this year to 2025. The first 5G-enabled smartphones are just beginning to arrive, though access to 5G networks will be limited. Real-world tests of the technology are underway only in a few dozen U.S. cities and other locations worldwide.
Analysts disagree on where the first impact will be felt. Some say in commercial and industrial applications. Others see 5G technology initially gaining momentum on the consumer side, particularly in gaming. Industrial applications will come later, according to some analysts, as the competency of the technology proves itself. But long term, business applications are where 5G appears likely to have the greatest impact.
“It’s an exciting tech but a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, a lot of hype,” said Jason Leigh, IDC research analyst covering mobility. “Because of that, it’s hard to say which specific industries will really benefit most, but I think the biggest impact will be on the business side overall.”
In addition to network infrastructure providers such as Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia, other beneficiaries of 5G network deployment include vendors exposed to the metro foundations and core cloud infrastructure. Cisco Systems, Ciena, and Juniper Networks fall into this category, wrote analyst Simon Leopold at Raymond James in a research report on 5G.
More Chips Needed
The deployment of 5G infrastructure also requires lots of semiconductor content, mainly due to higher radio content tied to antenna counts. Analog Devices, Marvell Technology, and Xilinx have large 5G infrastructure content, and each has already experienced early benefits as 5G trials progress, Leopold said.
Chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm, meanwhile, are involved in 5G trials. The rollout also requires network densification, which involves replacing cell towers with smaller, more tightly spaced transmit/receivers and benefits apparatus suppliers such as CommScope.
A report from the Global Mobile Suppliers Association said there are about 201 operators globally that have initiated 5G efforts, as of January. That’s up from 154 the previous year. A 2018 survey by Ericsson found that nearly 20% of 900 companies interviewed aimed to do 5G-related proof-of-concept trials in that year. An additional 38% planned to run trials in 2019.
In 2016, Ericsson found that 59% of respondents thought 5G wouldn’t be on their radar for at least five years. By 2018, that number had fallen to just 11%.
Sparking A New Era Of Entrepreneurship
Altogether, that means the 5G network upgrade will eventually affect almost every aspect of business. This includes manufacturing, health care and emergency services, education, transportation , smart cities and smart homes.
It’s also expected to expand and improve the capabilities of drones and other aerial systems and enhance autonomous vehicles. 5G will also fast-forward the application of virtual reality and augmented reality in industrial applications.
“5G will spark an unprecedented new era of entrepreneurship and business opportunities as new technologies are created, tested and rolled out in cities across the country,” wrote Craig Silliman, Verizon’s executive vice president for public policy, in a December article. He also said the 5G network will act as the backbone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And he asserted that robotics, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and drones will change almost every facet of society.
5G Use Cases and Applications
Morgan Stanley analyst Simon Flannery identified seven uses that could drive $156 billion of incremental annual revenue by 2030.
These are: $64 billion for manufacturing automation; $9 billion for cloud gaming; $18 billion for fixed wireless; $7 billion for autonomous vehicles; and $20 billion for surveillance and smart cities. He also estimates $4 billion for drones and $32 billion for remote health care services.
“The business opportunities for 5G are just exponentially bigger than previous-generation networks,” wrote Flannery, who covers North American telecom services. “And while the immediate opportunities may be limited, we believe revenue opportunities will emerge as technologies such as cloud-based gaming, autonomous vehicles, and remote surgery become mainstream.”
The first generation of mobile networks that debuted in the 1980s had the capacity to carry voice calls only. Then, 2G in the mid-1990s brought text messaging, basic data packages and partial internet services. As the new millennium began 3G ushered in the mobile internet, mobile computing, and the proliferation of apps. 4G (also called LTE) provided mobile broadband that allowed streaming video and audio and also enabled an explosion of social media apps and ride hailing services. Improvements to 4G technology continue, with rollouts in far-flung places still underway.
The power of 5G technology goes beyond current 4G wireless in several ways. For example, the time it will take for a wireless data signal to get a network response, known as latency, will shrink to about 1 millisecond, compared with 25 milliseconds with most 4G technology. It boasts bandwidth and data transmission rates more than 10 times faster than 4G LTE.
The number of devices that can connect to a 5G network, compared with existing 4G wireless towers, will also greatly expand. That’s particularly important to the rapidly expanding market for the Internet of Things. IoT is the global network of interconnected electronic devices embedded in everyday objects that share data. These will include smart homes, smart factories, smart power grids and other “systems of systems” networked configurations. There are currently more than 11 billion IoT connections worldwide; that’s expected to grow to more than 20 billion by 2020.
Among the earliest adopters could be gaming and the eSports venues, where services are already monetized and high speeds and ubiquitous connectivity are paramount.
In March, the Google unit of Alphabet announced Stadia. It’s a cloud-based gaming platform and a major move into the video game business.
Stadia is not an external console or set-top box. It is a cloud-based platform, accessible over the internet via a variety of formats.
Google‘s cloud servers will allow Stadia to stream games in 4K ultra-high definition and in 8K in the future. 5G is expected to play a crucial role in making it all work.
Microsoft is also creating its own cloud gaming service, dubbed xCloud.
“Games tend to be the tip of the spear for this kind of technology,” said Bill Morelli, chief of research for enterprise solutions at IHS Markit Technology. “While consumer segments will do better in the near term, business applications will emerge as 5G is more fully implemented and its capabilities are proven.”
Morelli doesn’t see major business applications using 5G emerging until about 2021 or 2022. While businesses are increasingly using digital technology in industrial fields, its been a slow process. Equipment replacement cycles are very long, and industry executives tend to be conservative when it comes to a major transformation.
Currently, the use of wired technology configurations far outweigh the use of wireless in industrial fields. Moreover, the bulk of wireless technology is not standard cellular wireless. It’s not considered fully reliable.
“Historically, cellular has not been a technology that was optimized for that sort of environment,” said Morelli. “But 5G is designed to close that gap, to do things with wireless you’re just not able to do today.”
One of the most anticipated uses is machine-to-machine communications, enhanced by IoT. It refers to direct communication between devices using any communications channel, including wired and wireless. IoT enables sensors or meters to communicate the data it receives so that they can be analyzed and acted upon.
Because 5G supports far more connections, it will provide the ability to connect embedded sensors in virtually everything, significantly accelerating enterprise adoption of IoT products and services.
In the development of smart cities, IoT and 5G will more closely monitor traffic flow and help reduce accidents. The addition of more sensors could also improve the distribution of utilities, monitor agriculture and improve infrastructure safety. This also includes crop monitors gauging water levels in agricultural environments and power-management systems in residential properties.
Many see IoT significantly increasing demand for microcontrollers, sensors, Wi-Fi and cellular chips, flash memory and high-performance processing units.
Among other technologies that will benefit from 5G expansion are drones and other autonomous aerial vehicles. UPS and FedEx are among the companies experimenting with autonomous vehicles and drone delivery.
The impact of 5G wireless will also be big in the health care market. It will accelerate the development and use of wearable devices for physical health monitoring and advance the medical equipment market in the development of surgical assistants and devices for remote surgery.
“There’s a lot to be excited about,” said IDC’s Leigh. “5G wireless will transform technology, but transferring that into dollars is another story.”
ICRA: Indian Telecom Industry Must Migrate from Copper to Dense Fiber Optic Networks
With over one billion mobile phone customers and an explosion of mobile data consumption over the past two years, the Indian telecom industry needs to migrate from traditional copper-based backhaul networks to dense optic fiber cable networks, according to Indian investment information and credit rating agency ICRA.
The proliferation of affordable smartphones, low data tariffs, increase in speeds of delivery and enhanced content have led to 539 million wireless internet subscribers in the country. This translates into daily consumption of 418,330 terabytes (TBs) of data. Each TB measures over 1,000 gigabytes. The data consumption is expected to grow over the long term with increasing applications, improving technology and more content. To meet the requirements, telecom networks need to be robust and have the capacity to carry large amounts of data and deliver it quickly, according to a new ICRA research report.
With each step on technology ladder from 2G to 3G to 4G and soon to be 5G, the fiber requirement has been increasing. 5G and its applications, which will likely grow exponentially in years to come, translate into speeds in excess of 10 Gbps as against the average speeds of 6 Mpbs achieved with 4G technologies in India (against a global average of 17 Mbps).
“Achieving such speeds make fiber connectivity essential. India’s high population density also translates into deeper and denser fiber network,” the report stated. At present, the country has about 500,000 towers of which only 22 per cent are fiberized as against 80 per cent in China. India has 110 million km of fiber deployed compared to 420 million km in the United States and 1,090 million km in China. Hence, India’s fiber coverage in km per capita works out to 0.09, which is far behind 0.87 for China and more than 1.3 for the United States and Japan. “The fiber density in India will have to increase at least four-fold. It means that fiber will evolve as a separate industry in some time, similar to the trajectory seen for telecom tower industry over the past two decades.”
ICRA estimates the present market value of fiber assets owned by major private telecom operators is about Rs 1.2 lakh crore. The extent of fiber rollout over the next few years will require investments of Rs 2.5 lakh crore to 3 lakh crore. Hence sharing of fiber among multiple telcos will be the key driver of a reasonable return on capital.
Trends of Indian Telecom Industry for January 2019 [SOURCE: ICRA Research]:
1) Total subscriber base at 1,203 million; YoY growth of 2.4%; MoM growth of 0.5%
2) 20 out of 22 circles reported increase in subscriber base on MoM basis; North East reported the highest MoM growth
3) Overall tele-density steady at 91.8%; Urban tele-density at 161.3%, rural tele-density at 59.4%
4) Wireless subscriber base at – 1,182 million; YoY growth of 2.6%; MoM growth of 0.5%
5) Active wireless subscriber base at 1,022 million; YoY growth of 1.0%; MoM de-growth of 0.4%
6) Vodafone Idea leads the market with active wireless subscriber market share of 37.6%, followed by Bharti at 32.4% and RJio
at 23.5%
7) Urban wireless subscriber base at 654.2 million; YoY growth of 0.2%; MoM growth of 1.0%
8) Rural wireless subscriber base at 527.8 million; YoY growth at 5.7%; MoM decline of 0.1%
9) Wireline Subscriber base at 21.8 million; YoY decline of 5.5%; BSNL/MTNL continue to be the market leader
10) Broadband subscriber base at 540.0 million; strong YoY growth of 43%
11) For September 2018 quarter, total minutes on network grew 41.2% YoY, while MoU per subscriber grew by 43.9%.
12) For September 2018 quarter, data subscriber base and per subscriber usage continued to report healthy YoY growth
China IT Minister: 5G Licenses Coming this Year; Deployment timing dependent on technology maturation
by Yang Ge (edited by Alan J Weissberger)
China will issue 5G wireless communications licenses by year-end, the nation’s telecoms minister said, as the country pushes aggressively into 5G before the IMT 2020 standard or 3GPP Release 16 spec are completed.
“I expect 5G licenses will be issued at some point this year,” Minister of Industry and Information Technology Miao Wei, said on Thursday in a session at the Boao Forum for Asia in South China’s Hainan province, the Shanghai Securities News reported. Wei added that actual timing for the launch of 5G network deployments will depend on maturation of the necessary technology, most notably 5G handsets. “Large-scale commercial service will need to wait until networks are perfected,” he said. “We need to give China’s (wireless) carriers some time.”
Editor’s Note: The three state owned and controlled China carriers are: China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom.
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China is the world’s largest mobile market with some 1.5 billion subscribers, with many in the world’s most populous country holding multiple accounts. But in the past the nation was slow to roll out the latest generations of new mobile communications, often preferring to wait for the technology to mature first in more advanced Western markets.
Beijing has taken a sharply different tack in 5G, aiming to become a leader in the space for a technology expected to power many of the wireless high-tech applications of the future such as telemedicine and self-driving cars. Accordingly, it wants to roll out its networks sooner rather than later, and for the first time could be among the world’s first major markets to launch service.
The technology could facilitate data-transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than current 4G technology, said Yang Chaobin, president of 5G product lines at China’s own Huawei Technologies, the world’s leading manufacturer of telecom equipment. Miao estimated that 20% of 5G will be used for person-to-person communications, while 80% will be used for communication between things such as applications behind self-driving cars.
Among China’s three major carriers, the largest, China Mobile, is aiming to roll out “pre-commercial” 5G service this year, with full commercial service available sometime next year, said Vice President Li Huidi, according to the Shanghai Securities News report. China Mobile’s smaller rivals, China Unicom and China Telecom, have previously said they will each invest around $1.2 billion this year on 5G networks.
Miao also said that countries and companies should work together on 5G, even as a U.S. coalition is expressing concerns about the security of equipment produced by Huawei, worried it could be used for spying by Beijing. “In my view, in the development of 5G, the most important thing is open collaboration, and a single standard for the world,” Miao said.
Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez also spoke to the recent politicization of 5G earlier in the week at Boao, saying competition in new technologies including 5G is not between different nations, and instead is a competition among enterprises.
Contact reporter Yang Ge ([email protected])
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Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=0_Yobh9MPQw
VSG LEADERBOARD : AT&T #1 in Fiber Lit Buildings- Year end 2020
Vertical Systems Group’s 2020 U.S. Fiber Lit Buildings LEADERBOARD results are as follows (in rank order by number of on-net fiber lit buildings): AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise, Lumen, Comcast, Cox, Crown Castle Fiber, Atlantic Broadband, Frontier, Zayo and Altice USA. These eleven retail and wholesale fiber providers qualify for this benchmark with 15,000 or more on-net U.S. fiber lit commercial buildings as of year-end 2020.
Additionally, fourteen companies qualify for the 2020 Challenge Tier as follows (in alphabetical order): Cincinnati Bell, Cleareon, Cogent, Consolidated Communications, Conterra, DQE Communications, Everstream, FirstLight, IFN, Logix Fiber Networks, Segra, Unite Private Networks, Uniti Fiber and Windstream. These fiber providers each qualify for the 2020 Challenge Tier with between 2,000 and 14,999 U.S. fiber lit commercial buildings.
“The base of fiber lit buildings in the U.S. expanded in 2020, although the pace of new installations was hampered by the pandemic. Challenges for fiber providers ranged from impeded installations due to commercial building closures and business shutdowns to supply chain disruptions,” said Rosemary Cochran, principal of Vertical Systems Group. “As the economy rebounds in 2021, fiber providers have opportunities to monetize the millions of small and medium U.S. commercial buildings without fiber, as well as larger multi-tenant buildings with only a single fiber provider. However it remains uncertain how changes in U.S. regulatory policies and federal funding could alter fiber investments and deployment plans in the next several years.”
2020 Fiber Provider Research Highlights:
- AT&T retains the top rank on the U.S. Fiber Lit Buildings LEADERBOARD for the fifth consecutive year.
- The threshold for a rank position on the 2020 Fiber LEADERBOARD is 15,000 fiber lit buildings, up from 10,000 buildings previously.
- Atlantic Broadband advanced to eighth position on the LEADERBOARD, up from eleventh in the previous year.
- Windstream and Consolidated Communications move into the Challenge Tier from the LEADERBOARD.
- Vertical Systems Group’s 2020 U.S. fiber research analysis for five building sizes shows that fiber availability varies significantly based on number of employees. The Fiber 20+ segment, which covers four building sizes with twenty or more employees, has a 69.2% fiber lit availability rate. This compares to 14.1% availability for the Fiber <20 segment, which covers buildings with fewer than twenty employees.
Market Players include all other fiber providers with fewer than 2,000 U.S. commercial fiber lit buildings. The 2020 Market Players tier includes more than two hundred metro, regional and other fiber providers, including the following companies (in alphabetical order): ACD.net, Armstrong Business Solutions, C Spire, Centracom, CTS Telecom, Douglas Fast Net, EnTouch Business, ExteNet Systems, Fatbeam, FiberLight, Fusion Connect, Google Fiber, GTT, Hunter Communications, LS Networks, Mediacom Business, MetroNet Business, Midco Business, Pilot Fiber, PS Lightwave, Shentel Business, Silver Star Telecom, Sonic Business, Syringa, TDS Telecom, TPX Communications, U.S. Signal, Veracity, Wave Broadband, WOW!Business, Ziply Fiber and others.
For this analysis, a fiber lit building is defined as a commercial site or data center that has on-net optical fiber connectivity to a network provider’s infrastructure, plus active service termination equipment onsite. Excluded from this analysis are standalone cell towers, small cells not located in fiber lit buildings, near net buildings, buildings classified as coiled at curb or coiled in building, HFC-connected buildings, carrier central offices, residential buildings, and private or dark fiber installations.
Cuba-Google agreement to speed up Internet access on the island
Google and ETECSA signed a memorandum of understanding to begin the negotiation of a so-called “peering agreement” that would create a cost-free and direct connection between their two networks. That would enable faster access to content hosted on the Google’s servers, which are not located on the island. Internet in Cuba has been notoriously sluggish and unreliable. In a country where information is tightly controlled, it remains to be seen how much Google’d information would be available in Cuba. That’s if and when a fast connection can be made between Cuba’s ETECSA controlled Internet and Google’s servers.
The agreement creates a joint working group of engineers to figure out how to implement this peering arrangement, likely via an undersea cable. What’s needed first is the creation of a physical connection between Cuba’s network and a Google “point of presence,” the closest ones being in South Florida, Mexico and Colombia. Cuba currently has a single fiber-optic connection running under the Caribbean to Venezuela that has been unable to provide the island with sufficient capacity to support its relatively small but growing group of internet users, for reasons never disclosed by either country’s Communist government. Neither Cuban or Google officials provided any estimated timeframe for the island’s connection to a new undersea fiber-optic cable. That step could take years given the slow pace of Cuba’s bureaucracy and the obstacles thrown up by the U.S. trade embargo on the island.
“The implementation of this internet traffic exchange service is part of the strategy of ETECSA for the development and computerization of the country,” Google and ETECSA said in a joint news release, read out at a news conference in Havana.
“We are excited to have reached this memorandum for the benefit of internet users here in Cuba,” Brett Perlmutter, the head of Google Cuba, said before signing the deal.
References:
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-partners-etecsa-cuba-2019-3
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-cuba-google-island.html
GSA: 102 Network Operators in 52 Countries have Deployed NB-IoT and LTE-M LPWANs for IoT
The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) reported on March 27th that 102 operators in 52 countries have now either deployed or launched at least one of the NB-IoT or LTE-M technologies. Of these, 20 operators in 19 countries had deployed or launched both NB-IoT and LTE-M,
Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE-M are low power wide area network (LPWAN) radio technology specifications developed by the 3GPP to enable a wide range of cellular devices and services, in particular IoT and machine-to-machine applications. As of the end of March 2019, GSA had identified:
- 149 operators in 69 countries investing in one or both of the NB-IoT and LTE-M network technologies
- 22 countries are now home to deployed/launched NB-IoT and LTE-M networks
- 28 countries are home to deployed/launched NB-IoT networks only, and two countries are home to deployed/launched LTE-M networks only
- 140 operators in 69 countries investing in NB-IoT networks; of which 88 operators in 50 countries had deployed/launched their networks
- 60 operators in 35 countries investing in LTE-M networks; of which 34 operators in 24 countries had deployed/launched their network
“The global momentum behind LPWAN deployments is testament to the revenue opportunities which operators are racing to win and monetise in a diverse range of new IoT applications. Significantly, it can also be seen as a precursor to operators replacing legacy M2M services such as GPRS-based trackers and preparing the ground for the eventual switch-off of their 2G networks,” commented Joe Barrett, President, GSA.
The latest data on NB-IoT and LTE-M devices, is fully available to all employees of GSA Executive, Ordinary Member companies and GSA Associates who subscribe to GSA Analyser for Mobile Broadband Devices (GAMBoD) service. The report can be found at https://gsacom.com/paper/global-narrowband-iot-lte-m-networks-march-2019/
GAMBoD is a unique search and analysis tool that has been developed by GSA to enable searches of mobile broadband devices and global data on Mobile Broadband Networks, Technologies and Spectrum (NTS). The LTE and 5G Devices database can be searched by supplier, form factor, features, peak downlink and uplink speeds, and operating frequency. Results are presented as a list or in charts. Charts may be inserted into documents or presentations, subject to accreditation of GSA as the source.
About GSA:
GSA is the voice of the mobile vendor ecosystem representing companies engaged in the supply of infrastructure, semiconductors, test equipment, devices, applications and mobile support services. GSA actively promotes the 3GPP technology road-map – 3G, 4G, 5G – and is a single source of information resource for industry reports and market intelligence. The GSA Executive board comprises of Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm, and Samsung with representation for other members including Viavi Solutions and ZTE.
GSA Membership is open to all companies participating in the mobile ecosystem and operators, companies and government bodies can get access to GAMBoD by subscribing as an Associate. More details can be found at https://gsacom.com/gsa-membership